arXiv subjects

Forrest McKee

Publications and source records attributed to Forrest McKee.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

NUANCE: Near Ultrasound Attack On Networked Communication Environments

This study investigates a primary inaudible attack vector on Amazon Alexa voice services using near ultrasound trojans and focuses on characterizing the attack surface and examining the practical implications of issuing inaudible voice commands. The research maps each attack vector to a tactic or technique from the MITRE ATT&CK matrix, covering enterprise, mobile, and Industrial Control System (ICS) frameworks. The experiment involved generating and surveying fifty near-ultrasonic audios to assess the attacks' effectiveness, with unprocessed commands having a 100% success rate and processed ones achieving a 58% overall success rate. This systematic approach stimulates previously unaddressed attack surfaces, ensuring comprehensive detection and attack design while pairing each ATT&CK Identifier with a tested defensive method, providing attack and defense tactics for prompt-response options. The main findings reveal that the attack method employs Single Upper Sideband Amplitude Modulation (SUSBAM) to generate near-ultrasonic audio from audible sources, transforming spoken commands into a frequency range beyond human-adult hearing. By eliminating the lower sideband, the design achieves a 6 kHz minimum from 16-22 kHz while remaining inaudible after transformation. The research investigates the one-to-many attack surface where a single device simultaneously triggers multiple actions or devices. Additionally, the study demonstrates the reversibility or demodulation of the inaudible signal, suggesting potential alerting methods and the possibility of embedding secret messages like audio steganography.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Numeracy from Literacy: Data Science as an Emergent Skill from Large Language Models

Large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-3 offer unique testbeds for exploring the translation challenges of turning literacy into numeracy. Previous publicly-available transformer models from eighteen months prior and 1000 times smaller failed to provide basic arithmetic. The statistical analysis of four complex datasets described here combines arithmetic manipulations that cannot be memorized or encoded by simple rules. The work examines whether next-token prediction succeeds from sentence completion into the realm of actual numerical understanding. For example, the work highlights cases for descriptive statistics on in-memory datasets that the LLM initially loads from memory or generates randomly using python libraries. The resulting exploratory data analysis showcases the model's capabilities to group by or pivot categorical sums, infer feature importance, derive correlations, and predict unseen test cases using linear regression. To extend the model's testable range, the research deletes and appends random rows such that recall alone cannot explain emergent numeracy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Chatbots in a Honeypot World

Question-and-answer agents like ChatGPT offer a novel tool for use as a potential honeypot interface in cyber security. By imitating Linux, Mac, and Windows terminal commands and providing an interface for TeamViewer, nmap, and ping, it is possible to create a dynamic environment that can adapt to the actions of attackers and provide insight into their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The paper illustrates ten diverse tasks that a conversational agent or large language model might answer appropriately to the effects of command-line attacker. The original result features feasibility studies for ten model tasks meant for defensive teams to mimic expected honeypot interfaces with minimal risks. Ultimately, the usefulness outside of forensic activities stems from whether the dynamic honeypot can extend the time-to-conquer or otherwise delay attacker timelines short of reaching key network assets like databases or confidential information. While ongoing maintenance and monitoring may be required, ChatGPT's ability to detect and deflect malicious activity makes it a valuable option for organizations seeking to enhance their cyber security posture. Future work will focus on cybersecurity layers, including perimeter security, host virus detection, and data security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Chatbots as Problem Solvers: Playing Twenty Questions with Role Reversals

New chat AI applications like ChatGPT offer an advanced understanding of question context and memory across multi-step tasks, such that experiments can test its deductive reasoning. This paper proposes a multi-role and multi-step challenge, where ChatGPT plays the classic twenty-questions game but innovatively switches roles from the questioner to the answerer. The main empirical result establishes that this generation of chat applications can guess random object names in fewer than twenty questions (average, 12) and correctly guess 94% of the time across sixteen different experimental setups. The research introduces four novel cases where the chatbot fields the questions, asks the questions, both question-answer roles, and finally tries to guess appropriate contextual emotions. One task that humans typically fail but trained chat applications complete involves playing bilingual games of twenty questions (English answers to Spanish questions). Future variations address direct problem-solving using a similar inquisitive format to arrive at novel outcomes deductively, such as patentable inventions or combination thinking. Featured applications of this dialogue format include complex protein designs, neuroscience metadata, and child development educational materials.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Chatbots in a Botnet World

Question-and-answer formats provide a novel experimental platform for investigating cybersecurity questions. Unlike previous chatbots, the latest ChatGPT model from OpenAI supports an advanced understanding of complex coding questions. The research demonstrates thirteen coding tasks that generally qualify as stages in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, ranging from credential access to defense evasion. With varying success, the experimental prompts generate examples of keyloggers, logic bombs, obfuscated worms, and payment-fulfilled ransomware. The empirical results illustrate cases that support the broad gain of functionality, including self-replication and self-modification, evasion, and strategic understanding of complex cybersecurity goals. One surprising feature of ChatGPT as a language-only model centers on its ability to spawn coding approaches that yield images that obfuscate or embed executable programming steps or links.

cs.CR↗